From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Mon May 01 2006 - 13:08:22 EDT
>--------------------- Original Message --------------------
>Subject: critics of statistics
>From: "Luis A. Aviles" <laviles@uprm.edu>
>Date: Sun, April 30, 2006 12:59 am
>To: glevy@pratt.edu
>-----------------------------------------------------------
>
>Dear Jerry:
>
>Please, forward the message, I would like to see what comes from it.
>
>Let me explain something to you about my interest in the matter. I am
>currently working in a project in which I present a critique of statistics
>based on the results of the U.S census conducted in Puerto Rico, as it
>relates to racial classification. My work criticizes the positivist
>assumptions of racial statistics. I would like to know of people working
>in the field of economics, and other fields, who work on issues related to
>a critique of any aspect of the social production of statistics. As the
>field of statistics presents itself of being non-ideological, I would like
>to be familiar with critiques of statistics. Do you know of anyone?
>Thanks,
>Luis A. Aviles
>University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez
I include some of my own reflections on this
topic, but my thinking has developed since I wrote
some of the below for listserves about eight
years ago (see archives of LBO-talk); some of
this was included in my dissertation, and there
are no footnotes here, so please do not cite
below.
But here are three sources:
Tukufu Zuberi, THICKER THAN BLOOD: An Essay on
how Racial Statistics Lie Minneapolis:University
of Minnesota Press, 2001)
The Politics of Large Numbers : A History of
Statistical Reasoning by Alain Desrosières,
http://raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/ (a set of
articles on racial classification in medicine)
several pieces by Michael Root on making kinds, classification and race.
DO NOT CITE BELOW WITHOUT MY PERMISSION
ON THE CONCEPT OF GENERAL INTELLIGENCE
Stephen Jay Gould argued against IQ testing on
the basis of his critique of the factor analytic
derivation of g (a unitary quality underlying all
mental cognitive activity) as the principal
component which can resolve the greatest amount
of information from a battery of tests. Gould did
not really argue against the cultural or class
and race biases of the test-- that is, IQ tests
are biased to validate status quo hierarchies as
a reflection of class- and race-differentiated
innate capacities (perhaps a more suitable topic
for what is supposed to be a popular critique of
the IQ industry) --but the attempt to resolve
test information into a principal component,
instead of rotating factor axes from their
principal component to new positions until
multiple clusters of intelligence are identified
and g has disappeared. That is, Gould argued
that g is a reification, an artifact of a
statistical technique, and the attempt to
simplify test information into a principal
component is ideologically (or metaphorically)
driven.
This argument which is as easily misinterpreted
as a positivist stricture against the postulation
of unobservable explanatory variables has been
challenged even by other critics of The Bell
Curve. As Clark Glymour puts it,
Gould claims that factor analysis produces
conjectures about the existence of unobserved
properties solely because the properties, if they
existed, would explain features of data; in his
phrasing factor analysis 'reifies' unobserved
quantities, and he thinks 'reification' is a Big
Mistake. I wonder whether he thinks atoms and
molecules and their weights are Big Mistakes as
well, and if not, why not.
However what drove Gould's argument is not
positivist skepticism towards the postulation of
unobservable causal mechanisms. Gould would not
have argued against the reification of g had it
be shown to have been detectable in its effects;
given however that variance in life outcomes that
general intelligence, much less inherited general
intelligence, could be shown to account for was
negligible even in terms of its supporters' own
data, Gould simply concluded that the postulation
of its existence has extra-scientific--nay,
scientistic--grounds. He argued that Spearman
had hoped to pass off the method--factor
analysis-- by which g can be derived from a
battery of tests as scientific on the basis of
unjustified analogy to physics:
Thus caught up in physics envy again, Spearman
described his own 'adventurous step of deserting
all actually observable phenomena of the mind and
proceeding instead to invent an underlying
something which --by analogy with physics--has
been called mental energy.'. Spearman looked to
the basic property of g--its influence in varying
degree, upon mental operations--and tried to
imagine what physical entity best fitted such
behavior. What else, he argued, but a form of
energy pervading the entire brain and activating
a set of specific 'engines,' each with a definite
locus. The more energy, the more general
activation, the more intelligence...If g pervades
the entire cortex, as a general energy, then the
s-factors for each test must have more definite
locations. They must represent specific groups of
neurons, activating in different ways by the
energy identified with g. The s-factors, Spearman
wrote (and not merely in metaphor), are engines
fueled by a circulating g.
Once the pseudo scientific nature of the
postulation of g is understood, one is led to
anthropologist André Béteille's interesting
comparison: as Indians are (or were) obsessed
with ranking people in terms of something that
cannot be measured (purity and pollution),
Americans are just as obsessed to the point of
having developed a compulsory billion dollar
industry with something just as immeasurable on a
single hierarchical scale....general
intelligence!
Pifalls of Racial Classification
Moreover, it is not clear that it is
scientifically meaningful to racialize the data
on variance in IQ at all. While indeed the
racialization of data can in many cases allow the
social scientist to measure the effects of racism
on social processes, the racialization of data
can arguably contribute in some cases to the very
racism that the research is meant to play a part
in remedying--that is, whatever contribution the
research makes to the eradication of racism
cannot be segregated from the more important
contribution it may make to the reification of
race without which racism would be impossible.
This threat is especially acute in the case of
so-called intelligence.
After all, the national controversy over how to
account for the putative racial IQ gap, created
in and through the discursive system of racial
classification, could itself sanction sufficient
racism and correlative self-doubt as to render
the possibility of racial causation plausible
after all: the discursive system of racial
classification in this case may create the
conditions which render its use reasonable as a
way of measuring its own effect on society. Race
would seem then to be at times a textbook example
of what Ian Hacking refers to as dynamic
nominalism--the process by which systems of
classification become entrenched, objective and
perduring.
Implicitly drawing from J.L Austin's speech act
theory, Pierre Bourdieu has made the same point
about family discourse:
In a kind of circle, the native category, having
become a scientific category for demographers,
sociologists and essentially social workers, who,
like official statisticians, are invested with
the capacity to work on reality, helps to give
real existence to that category. The
[race]discourse that ethnomethodologists refer to
is a powerful, performative discourse, which has
the means of creating the conditions of its own
verification and therefore its own reinforcement,
an institutional discourse which durably
institutes itself in reality.
In the festschrift to the philosopher Nelson
Goodman, Paul Starr has also expressed the
problem well: "Categories accumulate. We do not
ordinarily think about nor act upon the
categories of social life; we act and think
within them." This indeed may be the greatest
tragedy of race. For in this sordid debate about
racial gaps in intelligence, reflection seems
required about exactly why there is social
interest in it in the first place. Why does one
not find, as Eugene Genovese smartly asked,
scholarly publications on the IQ gaps between
Sicilians, WASP's and Jews:
Well, then, why do they [Herrnstein and Murray]
lump all blacks together? Where, apart from a few
inadequate and unhelpful remarks, do we find an
examination of ethnic differences among blacks
in, say, performance on IQ tests? And the same
criticism could be extended to the treamtment of
whites, not all of whom might respond to other
comparisons with the equanimity they show for
comparisons involving blacks. Personally, I am
pleased to be told that blacks are not as smart
as Sicilians, but I would not recommend that
anyone try to tell me that Sicilians are not as
smart as WASP's or Jews.
One cannot naively assume that a racial gap in IQ
simply exists. In Morris Cohen and Ernest Nagel's
succinct formulation, classifying " really
involves, or is a part of the formation of
hypotheses as to the nature of things." . That
is, classification choices are themselves part of
theory choices made in terms of values like
explanatory power, empirical adequacy,
simplicity, and so forth, but in particularly
contested issues like social inequality,
political values enter in as well. The
classification of variance in IQ by race has to
be understood as a choice: the classification may
imply that the researcher believes that racism or
congenital racial inferiority is an important
causal factor in that variance or that the
researcher believes that the width of the
dispersion will become either more or less
politically tolerable if it is understood in
racial terms. But the state and the social
sciences, in their official capacity and due to
their cognitive authority, establish conventions
of how to see things Yehudi Webster for example
would argue that official racialized statistics
only reify racial categories and overall
contribute to the very racism that they are
trying to eradicate--that is, whatever
contribution they make to the measurement and
eradication of racism cannot be segregated from
(as noted above) the more important contribution
they make to the reification of race without
which racism would be impossible. While this
argument may be unpersuasive in many aspects of
social life, it has greater plausibility in the
study of "race"-based differences in
"intelligence." In short, the national debate
over the racial IQ gap may be one aspect of the
racism that coupled with wealth poverty would
have led to a greater "racial" gap if not for the
resilience of minority culture. One could of
course argue that if one did not racialize the
data there would be no way of confirming the
hypothesis about the resilient superiority of
minority culture, but this seems to be a case
that the racism and self doubt generated by
official debate about how to explain the gap
have been simply too destructive to want to keep
the debate alive.
To reiterate: this is not to suggest an argument
against the racial classification of data on
social problems tout court; it is rather an
argument for self-reflexive awareness from the
social scientist about why problems are
understood in racial terms in the first place.
One can imagine for example Murray and Herrnstein
jumping on the fact of a higher propensity to
domestic homicide among blacks than whites. Yet,
as reported in the Journal of the American
Medical Association, the six-fold difference in
black and white rates of domestic homicide
disappear when household crowding is used as a
measure of socioeconomic status. A racial
classification of the distribution of this social
pathology thus leads to a mis-specification of
the causal forces which partially explain
pathology. Racial comparative statistics on
domestic homicide rates do not depict a racial
reality. Rather, they are the data produced by
the racial theory. But it is more portentous than
a simple scientific error in classification. What
implications will be drawn from the "self-evident
fact" of the more violent propensities of blacks?
What race-specific solutions will be proposed?
This is of course not an idle question. In 1992,
Dr. Frederick Goodwin, then head of the
Alcoholism, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health
Administration (ADAMHA), focused on a "rising
rate of homicide among black men" and later
attempted to make sense of the ghetto through
analogies with violent behavior of monkeys in the
jungle, reading stereotypes of African-Americans
back into monkeys, as Pat Shipman wryly put it.
Goodwin would later be involved with the Violence
Initiative which proposed to study the putative
biological and chemical deficiencies of those who
had committed acts of violence and devise
appropriate drug therapies. It was in short an
attempt to cast a social issue as a public health
problem of a racially identifiable group. It is
simply not obvious that variance in social
outcomes is always well understood in racial
terms and that the social-scientific attempt to
do so can be easily segregated from the causal
forces that produce differences in social
outcomes by race. But this kind of
self-reflexiveness is underdeveloped among
positivist social scientists.
Given the nonsensical nature of any claim about a
heritable racial IQ gap, if not the existence of
the "fact" of a racial IQ gap, it is astonishing
to discover academic ambivalence about the
possibility of deep heritable racial differences
in cognitive potential. In the Black White Test
Score Gap Christopher Jencks and Meredith
Phillips report:
Snyderman and Rothman asked a sample of over 1000
psychologists, sociologists, and educational
researchers, 'Which of the following best
characterizes your opinion of the heritability of
black white differences in IQ?' Of the 661
'experts' who returned a questionnaire, 14
percent declined to answer this particular
question, 24 percent said the data were
insufficient, 1 percent thought the gap was 'due
entirely to genetic variation,' 15 percent
entirely to environmental variation, and 45
percent thought it was a 'product of both genetic
and environmental variation.' It is not clear how
many of those gave the 'both' response would
accept our conclusion that genes do not play a
large role in the black-white gap.
This deeply troubling survey result and
interpretation seem to suggest that most
educational psychologists, as well as these
authors, do not rule out the possibility that
Africans are somewhat deeply racially different
than whites in their respective capacities for
intelligent thought. As Block notes, many critics
of The Bell Curve were implicitly arguing for a
low degree of genetic inferiority in blacks. It
is interesting that while the psychologist Arthur
Jensen is referred to five times in this volume,
Richard Lewontin, the world famous geneticist and
co-author of Education and Class, is not
mentioned once. There is thus unsurprisingly no
nuanced discussion of what heritability even
means and the problems of conducting such an
analysis on human, as opposed to on plant and
breeding animal populations. Yet it seems clear
to me that there has to be extra scientific
reasons not to dismiss in unequivocal terms the
idea of any heritable racial difference in terms
of the pseudo- entity of (reified) intelligence.
This would be the only reasonable conclusion to
reach scientifically--the refusal to even
consider the hypothesis of any heritable racial
differences in intelligence in terms of
insufficient evidence to accept the existence of
the posited entities of deeply differentiated
races with concordant variations and the factor
analytic derived entity of g. That is the
hypothesis of whether there are genetically
determined IQ differences between the races seems
a scientific non starter, no less absurd that
doing a few regressions to reject the hypothesis
of whether witchcraft truly brings misfortune.
Indeed we know from Evans-Pritchard's analysis of
witchcraft of how internally contradictory and
explanatorily insufficient belief systems can not
only maintain their purchase but also remain
important for the reproduction of an unequal
society. The power of race, like witchcraft,
partially derives from how much it allows one to
make easy sense of various misfortunes and the
in-built safeguards it has against explanatorily
failure. However, it is not yet widely accepted
in the academy that there is as much madness in
this whole way of thinking about the heritable
differences in races as there would be in the
power of witchcraft. To say that there are no
genetically inferior races is inadequate because
it commits one at least to that way of speaking.
It seems to commit one to the view that even if
there is no decisive evidence for genetically
inferior races, there might have been or still
be. To speak in this way about witches is more
easily seen be involved in a distortion than if
one speaks this way about heritable racial
differences.
Race and Medicine
As has been noted by Vincente Navarro, on one of
the rare occasions (in 1986) that the government
did collect statistics on mortality rates for one
of the most important causes--heart disease--by
class, it was discovered that there was a higher
differential in the rate for heart disease
between blue and white collar workers (2.3. times
higher for the former) than there was between
blacks and whites (about 1.3 times higher).
Drawing the conclusion that "growing class
mortality differentials, which are ignored by the
government and the media, are primarily
responsible for the growing race mortality
differentials, not the other way around," Navarro
is arguing, in effect, that reliance of race as a
variable in health statistics reifies white
identity while 'de-emphasizing the class
structure of American society and (making) it
appear that the differences are genetic (and
pan-racial) and therefore not a function of
social and economic inequality or racism."
Navarro himself writes:
The evidence is overwhelming that class is an
extremely important category for understanding
the lives and deaths of the US population. Why,
then, do the government and the media focus on
race and ignore class? Why is the United States
the only major developed capitalist country that
does not collect mortality statistics by
class....The absence of class analysis and class
discourse is a victory for the capitalist class,
which encourages the myth of the middle-class
society. The capitalist class emphasizes race
rather than class as a means to keep white
workers on its side. For instance, mortality
statistics that show that whites have better
health indicators than blacks suggest that white
workers are more similar to their white bosses
than they are to black workers. Because of
racism, blacks have higher mortality indicators
than whites within each class and within each
occupational category. That is why it is
important to publish mortality statistics by
race, standardized by class. But the publication
of mortality statistics by race alone is not only
unscientific, it is an ideological statement. It
assumes--as the federal government does--that
race is the most important category by which to
divide our population. This assumption is of
course wrong: it divides rather than unites
people who, in fact, have more similarities than
differences in their ways of living and dying.
(109)
For all its powerful implications, Navarro's
attempt to reduce race to "an ideological
statement" is however ultimately unsatisfactory.
For one, it does not capture the ways in which
race is subjectively experienced as a
self-evident category. Secondly, Navarro does not
dwell on the complexity of how race can be both
(merely) a misrepresentation of fundamental
social contradictions and still a (real)
precipitant of inequality, both an ideology and a
material force. That is, Navarro seems to be
saying both that membership in the minority group
gives one a greater likelihood of experiencing a
certain outcome (the implicit assumption being
that "it's really minorities' overrepresentation
in the working class that explains their
disproportionate health problems.") and that
minority status in itself is also in some sense
causally relevant to being subjected to some
specified outcomes. In all fairness to Navarro,
there is certainly inherently nothing
contradictory in arguing that race is both an
index of a more powerful factor that cannot for
ideological reasons be specified in any other way
and itself a factor in the eventuation of
outcomes. To be sure, Navarro is not saying that
minority status is causally relevant only in so
far as it gives one a greater statistical
likelihood of suffering blue collar working
conditions. Race itself can be the proximate
cause of outcomes through for example stress from
racism or awareness of the low status to which
one is consigned in the eyes of others on account
of this or that somatic particularity. Navarro's
point seems to be that not only is race
overburdened as an explanation for the health
problems of minorities, it serves to obscure the
problems of workers, regardless of race. And he
indeed can say that without having to deny that
racial discrimination is active in the social
world.
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